Posts Tagged ‘social selling’

Today, I would like to feature a guest blog from a good friend of mine, Melonie Dodaro on the topic of Social Selling. In her latest book, she describes how salespeople can unlock the power of LinkedIn in the sales process to generate lead and do prospecting efficiently. So here it goes…

“We have entered an era of digital transformation that has completely changed the way people buy. As a result, businesses, marketers, and sellers, need to adapt to stay relevant and competitive in attracting the modern buyer.

We have experienced more change in the last decade than anyone could have possibly imagined.

To attract today’s buyer, it requires a shift in the sales dialogue from “What can I sell you?” to “How can I help you?”

Today your personal brand is more important than it’s ever been as people are looking to find out more about an individual before they do business with them.

Seven seconds is all you have to wow a potential client. Your social selling success is dependent on how your LinkedIn profile represents your personal brand.

With all of these challenges, there is still tremendous opportunity. You now have tools available to you to connect directly with your ideal prospects, with the click of a button.

And while everyone has been talking about social media for years, few talk about the power of LinkedIn. I believe many businesses ignore LinkedIn for two primary reasons:

It isn’t sexy.

It isn’t fun or exciting.

While LinkedIn may not be exciting, getting new clients and having a successful business certainly is!

There are five crucial steps that will turn LinkedIn into a highly predictable lead generator for you; I call this The LINK Method™.

In the infographic below I will share with you the five-step process, what you need to have in your profile to attract your ideal clients, trigger events that allow you to build relationships with your prospects on LinkedIn, how to leverage existing relationships, and much more.

Are you interested in discovering how to turn LinkedIn into a lead generation machine? Take a look at the infographic below:

I believe that when you stop collecting connections and start building relationships, you increase trust, credibility and attract more clients. This is vital because effective social selling is all about building relationships and trust.

The beauty of LinkedIn is that it is a platform that was designed to help you find, connect and then build a relationship and trust with the exact group of people that comprise your target audience.

Yet people continue to make two very serious mistakes with LinkedIn and social selling.

Mistake #1: They rush to a sale right after connecting with a potential prospect.

Mistake #2: They never move the conversation offline, or don’t know how to, as it’s offline that you convert a prospect to a client.

In LinkedIn Unlocked you will learn a step-by-step system that will help you generate a steady stream of new leads, clients, and sales on LinkedIn in under 30 minutes a day.

To celebrate the launch of LinkedIn Unlocked, there is also $221 in free bonuses, including a companion workbook with all of the exercises, worksheets and templates provided in the book. Click here now to learn more about LinkedIn Unlocked and the exclusive bonuses.”

I recently organized an event together with “ADM – Where Business meets ICT” on the subject of Employee Advocacy. It is a hot topic for many companies as the low hanging fruit for brand ambassadors has not been picked yet.

Here is what members of ADM taught us. The full list of questions are below in the appendix

Q1: What words come to mind when you hear the word “Employee Advocacy”?

Here is what the audience thought….

We all know that Employee advocacy” is a term used to describe the exposure that employees generate for brands & company using both their own online and offline assets.

Q2 – Q4 pertained to current Employee Advocacy

About 2 out 3 companies that took part in the on line survey during the event had a program in shape or form for EA. Most of the Advocacy seemed to happen on LinkedIn (45%) while Twitter and Facebook came in 2nd with about 23%. In most companies between 15% and 25% of employees are being advocates.

Q5: What Employee Advocacy programs do you know?

One thing that is clear is that even though there are many platforms out there, people seem to know few of them.

Q6 – Q8 pertained to who drives the EA initiative

Though marketing seems to be the biggest driver (46%), HR and communications are close seconds. Even though we seem to hear that incentives are the key to successful EA, most of the companies in the survey disagreed. Less than 30% offer incentives to their employees.

Now with Employee Advocacy comes the danger of having things go wrong so having a clear up to date social media policy is key. As my other research has shown about 50% of companies are not paying attention and have no or an outdated social media policy.

Q9: Who is responsible for the content that will be shared through Employee Advocacy?

The obvious answer seems to be marketing but stories from and by employees seem to be the trick to successful EA.

Conclusion

If your company want to start with an Employee advocacy plan a few steps need to taken:

Make sure you have a culture of sharing and openness

Update your social media policy

Have your employee create content

Implement an employee advocacy platform

Encourage sharing through a smart incentive plan

What are your thoughts, feedback and experiences? Love to hear from you

Salespeople are embracing social selling. There are a lot of benefits to adding social to your traditional sales process which has been covered in many different articles. These articles cover things such as researching your clients, content curation, relationship building and even lead generation.

After doing some research of where your target audience is , creating social (selling) profiles is easy. Especially with all the good advice, tips and tricks you can find on the internet. But then the next dilemma’s arrive on the scene: what content to post where, how many posts and how much time will this take?

Of course, there is no unique and one answer to these questions. There are some articles out there that say you will be spending 20 – 60 minutes per day, but is that realistic? Looking at the forerunners of social selling might give us some more insight. Where better to look for inspiration on the above questions than to the list with the Top 30 Social Salespeople. Today, I will focus on what they do on Twitter.

Quantity

There are many posts about how many times you should tweet per day. One thing that seems to jump out is that the quantity seems to be going up. In the past it was once a day but today the number is likely going up to 3 to 8 tweets a day. This includes of course your tweets, retweets and replies to others.

But how many are our experts averaging? A quick analysis gives us a range between 4 and 36 tweets per DAY! The average being 17. One of the reasons why this number could high is because these experts are taking part in twitter chats and are much solicited by their “fans” but that could also be considered as social selling.

Digging a little deeper, it seems they are tweeting every day of the week with Saturday and Sunday at a 1/3 or less of the weekday volume. And most tweet around the clock with a real dip around 2-5 AM. I assume this has to do with their worldwide audience and their use of scheduling tools.

And then there is the lifespan of a tweet. After some digging I found that this varies between 10 and 18 minutes.

Conclusion: There is, of course, no exact number but it seems that you need to tweet 10+ times/day or otherwise said “once every hour” during the workday. And possibly 3 times/day during the weekend.

Content Structure

There is no such thing as a perfect tweet, but common knowledge has it that every tweet should have a good text with a call to action, a link to more content and one or more hashtags. To make the tweet complete, you might add a twitter handle as part of a reply or general mention.

Unfortunately, most tweets do not adhere to this scheme. Our experts manage include a link to more content in about 15% to 90% of their tweets. The average being one tweet out of two having a link. When it comes to the use of hashtags, we see a similar behavior. The experts average between 0 and 4 hashtags per tweet.

Conclusion: Every tweet you send out should have at least one or possibly 2 hashtags.

Time investment

So how much time do you spend tweeting? The 2 above topics can give us some indication on how much time you will be spending per day. Since there is no real science to this, here are some of my thoughts

Tweet 12-15 x day

Every other tweet has a link to additional content and a good hashtag.

Average time to create and send out a tweet: 1 minute (and yes this can vary) but keep in mind that some thought needs to go into the text, call to action and hashtag(s) to use.

If you include a link in your tweet or you retweet a tweet with a link, you need make sure you have read the content of the link which I will count as 1 minute per link. Since half the tweets contain links this will consume some time.

Conclusion: Taking the above bullet points into account, you will spend 20 minutes or more per day on your outgoing tweets.

And there is more

Of course, sending out tweets (like sending out email content) is only the beginning of the integration of social into your sales process. You will be investing time into listening, content reading /curation and actual relationship building. More to follow in future posts.

So how much time do you think you invest into your social selling routine?

If Social Selling is all about Connecting, Listening and Content Sharing, then getting started on Social Media can be a daunting task. Have you ever wondered which tools you could/should be using? And more importantly, how much time you need to spend on it. Here is my take (and experience) on it.

Connecting
Social Networking platforms are made for connecting. Here you will find the obvious candidates such as LinkedIn and Twitter. However, Xing and Viadeo might be good alternatives in the German and French speaking markets. Not everyone is on LinkedIn. In a B2B situation, Facebook seems the last option social sellers jump on. But since so many people have a profile here, it might make sense to link here too but you need a clear strategy on what and how to share. The inevitable discussion between personal and professional lives.

Finding and connecting new prospects and clients are here clearly the marching orders. Nothing new so far. Make discovering new contacts part of your daily routine.

Listening
Here it becomes a little more complicated and time consuming. There are at least 2 reasons for monitoring: understanding what your contacts are saying/doing/interested in and finding interesting content to share in the content sharing stage.

Listening to what your contacts are saying can be done through Hootsuite and LinkedIn Saved Searches, while finding content could be done through Google Alerts, LinkedIn Pulse, Feedly or any other RSS feeder program.

How much time you will be spending on this part of your social selling routine will vary a lot depending on the number of contacts, the activity level of those contacts, the variety of topics you are following and how much reading you will be doing yourself.

Content Sharing
Content is everywhere on the internet but prime locations are Slideshare, YouTube (or Vimeo), Blogs and Forums. Once you have that content you will want to share it. Tools such as Buffer or Hootsuite.

Additionally to sharing interesting content from others (less than 40% of all your content) you will need to create. You might create presentations, blog posts and general status updates/tweets. Let me be clear that this is a time intensive task and thus easily postponed. Once you created your own content you will want to share this with your contacts via Status Updates and Tweets.

Finally, through the monitoring and listening programs you will also find more opportunities to engage with and help your clients and prospects. Your entrance ticket to become a trusted advisor.

Again, it is hard to put a number on this when it comes to time spent. Do not consider this lost time but think how much time you saved by not having to drive to your client to have a conversation.

10-60-30 Rule of Social Selling
Social Selling is more about the approach rather than the use of a number of tools (see above). Over the course of time, this has evolved into a daily routine. My experience has demonstrated that the different steps and tools must be interwoven with everything you do during the day.

Today I can say that I spend about 10% of my time working on the connecting bit. 60% reviewing what my listening tools unearth in terms of client conversations and content. And I must admit that most of the time goes to reading and qualifying whether this information can be shared to provide more value to the clients (and me, of course). Finally, 30% is the actual sharing and personal content creation.

When you use linkedIn we all love the feature “Who has viewed our profile”. Though this is a key feature on LinkedIn and in a social selling approach, it is also a great source of frustration.

But first something else I am wondering about connected to “Who has viewed your profile”. Recently I saw a post that someone who completes their “Summary” get 10x more views on LinkedIn. Watch out there is a catch which I will come to later. For now, no one nor any article can explain me if this is true or why? Of course, I believe you need to complete this section in your profile since it is your evelator pitch. But what the effect is on being found, I do not really get. Well secretly, I do. Anyone (from LinkedIn) care to comment and back it up with proof?

And now for my catches.

LinkedIn is all about networking. And still people decide they want to remain semi-anonymous or anonymous. It is my experience these people are either my competitors or recruiters. I can’t t get my head around the fact they are not open to being identified. I wonder if they go to real life network meetings with a bag over their head or hand you a business card from someone else? Strange! I guess they have a good reason which I fail to understand, but that is my problem and yes, my frustration. Let me tell you I will let you know if I viewed your profile and who knows maybe we can help eachother! That is the true nature of networking and LinkedIn.

But recently I ran across another interesting issue. The count of people who viewed my profile seems to be different depending on the language interface I use. Below is a screenshot of my profile views using the english (342) and dutch (559) interface. Very strange indeed. It seems LinkedIn makes me more popular in NL than EN. And yes, they are the same people. Out goes my trust in LinkedIn statistics! Anyone care to enlighten me?

Let me be clear, I am a LinkedIn addict and believer but sometimes we need to step back to put it all into perspective. Of course, I will continue to use the “who viewed my profile” to reach out to people and conduct business. I love to hear your views and comments!

When you get involved in social media, you quickly learn that it requires regularity and discipline. Creating a daily routine is of course one of the best ways to approach this. Over time I have together a 30-minute routine.

Here are the things I do before breakfast:

Email

Delete uninteresting/unwanted emails.

Mark emails to be treated during the workday.

Answer urgent emails.

Check emails from LinkedIn groups for good content and mark for later reading.

Review Google Alerts and mark interesting items with GetPocket.

Social media monitoring

Review social media monitoring dashboard and react appropriately.

Go to Hootsuite and review monitoring columns and react appropriately.

LinkedIn

People Who viewed your profile is a perfect opportunity to start a conversation or even get connected (selectively).

Contacts show people that have a New job, Birthday or Work Anniversary. This again is a great opportunity to start a conversation.

Review LinkedIn Inbox for messages and connection requests.

Twitter

Check tweets that mention me and act appropriately

Check newfollowers out

Check who unfollowed me and decide on course of action (recapture or accept)

Quickly review the recent Tweet stream

Facebook & Google+

Check personal and company timelines for posts from friends and fans

Wish friends a Happy Birthday

Check messages and take action if needed

Content sharing

Share my quote of the day or content from others across a number of platforms

Contribute and share content through my Tumblr blog on Social Media tools

Having created this routine, I am able to start my day informed, organized and inspired. Since I have created this morning, I have also developed a similar approach for the evening routine. The evening routine focuses more on content generation but I will discuss this in another blog post.

Do you have a similar routine? Why not share it through the comments below. Or do you want details about any of the steps mentioned in my routine, send me a mail (mic@vanguard-leadership.be)